About Me

Friday, November 30, 2012

The night before last Charles and I ran an old DVD of the
1950 classic All About Eve, which
remains a brilliantly wrought film even though it’s a bit too long for its own
good (it runs 136 minutes and could probably have been dispatched in two hours
even without losing anything except a few of writer-director Joseph L.
Mankiewicz’ wisecracks — though it’s Mankiewicz’ wisecracks that really make
the film!): it’s both cynical and hilarious, it’s vividly acted (Anne Baxter
delivered the performance of her life, and the lines George Sanders — whose
character adds acid to the alcohol-drenched rest of the dramatis
personae — delivers about Bette Davis’s
character, Margo Channing, is equally true about Davis herself: “Margo is a
great star, a true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything
else”) and, as I noticed the last time I watched it, impeccably constructed.
Mankiewicz was very careful to time just when each character saw through Eve Harrington’s innocent
act and caught on to the manipulative bitch she was — Thelma Ritter’s character
saw through her instantly (Charles pointed out that this was the first of two films in which both Ritter and Marilyn Monroe
appeared — the other was The Misfits, Monroe’s last completed movie), Celeste Holm’s was the last to catch on (only when Eve made a play for her
husband, played by Hugh Marlowe), Davis’s caught on relatively early and the
others, Gary Merrill as director Bill Sampson (listed as “Simpson” in the
closing credits even though he’s called “Sampson” throughout the film) and Hugh
Marlowe as playwright Lloyd Richards, find out somewhere in between — though
not before the Richardses arrange, in a plot twist Mankiewicz seems to have
“borrowed” from the movie Holiday Inn, for Margo to miss a performance of her current vehicle, Aged
in Wood, so Eve (as her understudy, a job
she wangled without telling Margo) can go on in her place, invite the critics
to witness her performance and get the lead in Richards’ next play, Footsteps
on the Ceiling. Charles pointed out that
though it’s a backstage story, we never actually see any of these people’s creative work — we never hear a
word of Lloyd Richards’ purported dialogue or watch Margo Channing or Eve
Harrington act or Bill Sampson direct — though in a sense we don’t need to: all
these people are so “theatrical” not only when they’re onstage but 24/7, they
are not only in but of the
theatre and we can easily imagine what they’re like onstage from what they’re
like offstage.

George Sanders was used to being able to steal the acting honors
from mini-talents like Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr in Samson and
Delilah (the way he out-acts the stars in
that practically has you rooting for the Philistines!) but here he makes a good
play for them even with mega-talents like Davis and Baxter in the cast, and
he’s marvelous as the cynical narrator (though the story is actually told
through multiple flashbacks in the technique pioneered by Joseph Mankewicz’
brother Herman and Orson Welles in Citizen Kane). I’ve never been that impressed by Baxter — even under Orson Welles’
direction in The Magnificent Ambersons she’s still pretty much a non-entity, a quite ordinary romantic
juvenile lead hung out there as a prize awaiting Tim Holt once he gets his
“comeuppance” — but this is the performance of her career; Mankiewicz got a
convincing bitch out of her and managed to turn the tables and make Bette
Davis, even in full cry, surprisingly sympathetic and even a figure of pathos,
especially when she delivers the speech that manages to be moving despite its
rank sexism: “Funny business, a woman’s career — the things you drop on your
way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again
when you get back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in
common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to
work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the
last analysis, nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or
turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re
something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but
you’re not a woman. Slow curtain, the end.”

All About Eve, especially in Davis’s role, sounds so autobiographical it’s frankly unbelievable that it
was ever considered for anyone
else — least of all the relatively bland Claudette Colbert, who had weaseled
out of the lead in Frank Capra’s State of the Union (Katharine Hepburn, who had been running lines
privately with star Spencer Tracy, got the part) and got out of All
About Eve as well — officially she hurt her
back, but in light of her prima donna pretensions, vividly described by Capra in his autobiography (she said
she would never work past 5 p.m. and had her agent put that in all her contracts
because her doctor said she got too tired — “Her agent was her brother, and her
doctor was her husband,” Capra acidly commented), I suspect she had a
contractual problem and decided she didn’t want to do it for whatever it was
she was being offered. Much to her credit, Bette Davis not only stepped in but
allowed cinematographer Milton Krasner to photograph her unattractively, making
her still a good-looking woman but also clearly a middle-aged one, and when she
comments in the movie about how she’s tired of playing 20-somethings and for
once would like to act her age, I couldn’t help but flash back to the last
Davis film released before this one, Beyond the Forest (her last contract picture for Warner Bros. — she
made Payment on Demand for Howard
Hughes’ RKO in between but Hughes held it back until after All About
Eve was released and was a smash hit), in
which it looked like her makeup had been applied with a trowel in order to make
her look younger (and her long black Morticia Addams wig seemed like it had
been fitted on her head by a blind person). Once again, as through so much of All
About Eve, it seemed like “Margo Channing”
was an autobiographical portrait of Davis herself.

Current scholarship on the
film tends to discount the long-held belief that Davis based her Margo Channing
on Tallulah Bankhead — the raspy voice with which Davis speaks through much of
the film apparently came from long drawn-out and often loud arguments between
her and her soon-to-be ex-husband William Grant Sherry (father of her only
natural child, daughter B.D., though she adopted two more kids with husband
number four, Gary Merrill, whom she met making All About Eve) and the original basis of the story (a short story
by Mary Orr called “The Wisdom of Eve”) was a young woman who hung around the
theatre where actress Elisabeth Bergner was performing in London in the 1930’s
and saw her current play over and over again. All About Eve is a marvelously bitchy film, but at the same time
it has pathos and heart, and as one imdb.com poster noted it seems odd that
Joseph L. Mankiewicz knew little about the Broadway stage but made a great
movie about it (even satirizing the Broadway actors’ lordly contempt for films
as a medium), but when he came to make a movie about his own medium, film, it
was The Barefoot Contessa, a
critical and commercial flop and a lousy movie that wastes the talents of
Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner (though it carries over the multiple-narrator
structure Joseph Mankiewicz had appropriated from his brother’s script for Citizen
Kane and used in All About Eve as well).

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

The Amazing Spider-Man is an odd movie because for some reason the
“suits” at Columbia Pictures (including the late Laura Ziskin, who was the
principal producer and whose last film this was) decided midway through the
planning process to junk the plans for a Spider-Man 4 with the original director (Sam Raimi) and star
(Tobey Maguire) and instead “reboot” the franchise with a different director
(Marc Webb) and star (Andrew Garfield, whose most important previous credit was
probably as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network), working from a story by James Vanderbilt (though
the script is credited to Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves, indicating that they platooned at least two more writers
and had them do rewrites of Vanderbilt’s material) which went back and told yet
another version of the Spider-Man origin story. In this one, Norman Osbourne,
the founder and CEO of OsCorp (which is headquartered in a huge New York
skyscraper whose design by J. Michael Riva and his team of art directors is a
dead ripoff of the still-unbuilt design for the huge tower that’s supposed to
replace the World Trade Center on the original site of Ground Zero, adjacent to
the reflecting pools marking where the original Twin Towers stood until
September 11, 2001), is near death; for 15 years he’s been funding research
scientist Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) in search of a regeneration formula
that will restore him to his original state of health and youth. Dr. Connors
originally worked with another scientist, Dr. Richard Parker (Campbell Scott),
who mysteriously disappeared from his home in the middle of the experiments,
along with his wife Mary (Embeth Davidtz — that’s what the cast list on
imdb.com says her name is!), leaving their son Peter Parker (Max Charles) — and
no true Spider-Man maven needs two guesses as to who he’s going to grow up to
be! — in the custody of his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally
Field). Then Richard and Mary Parker were killed in a plane crash and Peter
grew up to be a high-school science student at New York’s Midtown Science High
School (and to be played by Andrew Garfield) without any clear idea of who his
parents were or what they had done before they died.

He doesn’t even know his
dad and Dr. Connors were research partners until he finds a briefcase that
belonged to his father and sees a picture of him and Dr. Connors together in
it, and he decides to crash an internship program Dr. Connors is giving — only
he’s caught, he ends up in Dr. Connors’ most secret lab, and he gets bitten by
not one radioactive spider (as in
the original comics and the first Spider-Man film with Tobey Maguire) but a whole pride of
them, though only one actually penetrates — and in this version he even brings
the spider home with him. It’s not radioactive this time, either; it’s been
genetically engineered in Dr. Connors’ lab because his whole research approach
is to isolate genetic traits that enable other species to regenerate themselves
and insert them into human genomes. Dr. Connors is in the middle of animal tests
on this formula, and he’s bred a race of three-legged mice as his research
subjects. Most of the mice died, but when one lives and successfully grows an
additional limb to match the complement of them mice have naturally, the
formula is snatched away from him by Rajit Ratha (Irrfan Khan), who announces
that large-scale human trials must begin at once so the formula is ready before
Norman Osbourne croaks. Dr. Connors balks at this, and Ratha tells him that at
one point his associate Dr. Richard Parker had similar ethical concerns, only
they removed him — and Ratha tells Connors that the human trials will begin at
once at a local veterans’ hospital to which OsCorp’s charitable arm
contributes. When Connors refuses to go along, Ratha simply orders his entire
department closed and everyone in it fired. (In the earlier Spider-Man movies I noted the presence of a sort of
nervous-tic anti-corporatism, and here it is again: a movie whose production
budget is probably bigger than the gross domestic product of at least five
sub-Saharan African nations is railing against the immense, unanswerable and
irrevocable power of the 1 percent.)

Meanwhile, Peter Parker is developing
super-powers from his close encounter with Dr. Connors’ super-spider, and at
first he can’t control them — he turns his bathroom into a wreck the first time
he tries to use it post-transformation — and as in the earlier versions of the
story he doesn’t understand that with great power comes great responsibility.
He uses his powers mostly to get back at the tall, blond, hunky star athlete
Flash Thompson (Chris Zylka) who’s been bullying him at school — I suspect the
writers called him “Flash” as an homage to Flashman, the bully character in the novel Tom Brown’s School
Days, which set the clichés for
virtually every depiction of high school since — and to win over Flash’s girl,
Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), who’s not only a hot-shot science student but also the
daughter of police captain Thomas Stacy (Dennis Leary). One imdb.com
contributor noted that Gwen Stacy was Peter Parker’s first girlfriend in the
comic books, but she wasn’t; Peter’s original girlfriend was Betty Brant, a
trick of Spider-Man creators
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to have the three principals in the stories (including
J. Jonah Jameson, Peter’s boss at the Daily Bugle — a plot element completely eliminated from this
version, probably because newspapers are so 20th century) have alliterative names;
later Betty was dumped from the comics and Gwen replaced her, and Gwen was
actually killed (giving the comic writers a powerful story arc showing Peter’s
grief) before Peter got to graduate from high school, go on to college and
start dating Mary Jane Watson, the name of his light o’love in the
Maguire/Raimi films. Anyway, Peter Parker’s disinclination to get involved when
a robber sticks up a bodega leads to the death of his uncle Ben, and the shock and grief smacks him
to attention and he gets serious about the superhero business.

Meanwhile,
rather than allow Ratha to use the poor old veterans in the nursing home as
human guinea pigs, Dr. Connors decides to inject himself with the rejuvenation
serum — and in the great tradition of self-experimentation gone wrong stories,
including the great-granddaddy of them all, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the injection turns him into the Lizard, a
400-pound living dinosaur but with Connors’ brain intact. (Charles said he had
no trouble suspending disbelief long enough to accept Peter Parker’s
transformation but he had a great deal of trouble with the Lizard because he’s
three times the size of Connors — Marvel had already pulled this gimmick with
the Incredible Hulk but at least in his case he was a creation of radioactivity, which presumably
could have expanded his atoms so he would be physically larger than he was as
Dr. Bruce Banner while still having the same mass — but the Lizard is not the result of atomic energy.) The rest of the
movie is typical superhero stuff, as the Lizard causes a wreck on the Brooklyn
Bridge (he’s trying to stop Ratha from getting the serum to the veterans’
hospital) and Spider-Man has to spin his webs (in this movie they’re a
mechanical/chemical device, not an intrinsic property of Spider-Man’s body; the comics started out with
Parker inventing a device that spun his webs, later shifted to an organic one,
and the Maguire/Raimi films made the webs organic from the get-go) and
Spider-Man has to rescue a kid from a burning car. The Lizard hides out in the
sewers under New York and Parker figures the only way to vanquish him is to
invent a device that will freeze him, since like real lizards he’s cold-blooded
and will suffer immobilizing paralysis from extreme cold.

The film times out at
two hours and 16 minutes, but it’s half over before Peter Parker finally gets
around to becoming Spider-Man and it’s at the two-thirds point before he has to
deal with the Lizard — who quite frankly isn’t a particularly interesting
super-villain (but then that’s been a weakness of all the current run of Spider-Man movies; aside from
Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man 2, they haven’t used most of the really imaginative villains from the
comics) — but overall it’s a good but not great entry in the current comic-book
superhero genre, with some marvelously
campy moments (notably a fight scene inside the Midtown Science High library,
in which one of the librarians is lost in a classical music piece he’s
listening to over headphones and is totally oblivious to the fight between
super-hero and super-villain going on just behind him) and a refreshing let-up
on the miseries and angst that the Maguire/Raimi films emphasized (Spider-Man 2 made the title character so doggedly unhappy and
unlucky I joked at the time it could have been called It’s a Wonderful Life,
Spider-Man) — though I had an odd
problem with Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man: he’s too good-looking, too sexy, to
be believable as the nerd. Still, no one goes to a movie like this for the
acting, and the ending (Thomas Stacy is killed in the final confrontation
between Spider-Man — whom he’s been trying to arrest and prosecute as a
vigilante all movie — and he extracts a promise from Spider-Man never to tell
what really happened) is not only well directed and well acted but genuinely
moving, ending the film on a sigh and a heartache rather than a baroque action
climax.

Like most movies today, it draws as much or more on older, better
movies than it does from life (even the weird, twisted version of it we get
from comic books); like just about everyone who makes a superhero movie today,
Marc Webb owes a lot to Tim
Burton and the urban-Gothic look he got out of his London-built sets of “Gotham
City” in the 1989 Batman, and as
Charles pointed out the experiments in Dr. Connors’ lab hearken back even
earlier, to H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and the three films made from it. Still, The
Amazing Spider-Man is good entertainment,
blessedly lacking the forced “seriousness” of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies and Watchmen — Webb and his writers remain aware that their
story isn’t a great vehicle for making insightful comments on the human
condition; it’s just a super-powered cop chasing a super-powered crook across a
recognizable but stylized cityscape, and though it probably could have been cut
to about two hours without suffering anything, it’s fine (and fun) the way it
is.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

I ran New Best Friend, a 2002 movie recently shown on Lifetime even
though it was apparently originally made for theatrical release (the production
companies are something called FGM Entertainment and Tri-Star Pictures, and the
ratings board gave it an “R” “for strong sexuality, language and drug use” even
though its TV rating was “PG-S,” indicating that the dirty language had been
removed and the drug use toned down but the sex remained). I’d had this one in
the backlog for a while and I was looking forward to more soft-core porn — the
hottest scene in the movie is a split-screen during the opening credits in
which on the left side of the screen Alicia Campbell (Mia Kershner) is shown
living a nerdy “grind” student’s life while on the right side her friend Hadley
Ashton (Meredith Monroe, who’d actually be good casting in a biopic of her
near-namesake Marilyn Monroe
even though here she’s playing more like a cool “Hitchcock blonde” than an
out-and-out sex goddess) is half-naked and making out with her boyfriend Trevor
(Scott Bairstow, fourth-billed and the first male listed in the cast — and the
director, Zoe Clarke-Williams, and writer, Victoria Strouse, are both women).
All this is happening in Colby College in Lawrence County, North Carolina, and
the film tells two parallel stories. The frame is an investigation being
conducted by the newly appointed acting sheriff, Artie Bonner (Taye Diggs),
into why Alicia Campbell started the year as an honor student, spiraled down
into drink and drugs as Hadley befriended her, and ended up comatose and near
death from an overdose. The flashback shows us the story of Alicia’s last year
at Colby, as she and Hadley are paired up by a sociology teacher to do a final
class project on the theme, “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way.” Alicia is the
child of a single mother (Glynnis O’Connor) and she’s determined to get into
law school, but her ability to pay for it is dependent on her getting financial
aid. Hadley and her two friends, Sidney Barrett (Dominique Swain) and Julianne
Livingston (Rachel True), are all rich bitches who don’t have much to worry
about in the way of finances, though Hadley is after her father to give her a
job and he doesn’t want to because he knows there’s nothing he needs in his office
(whatever it is — Strouse’s script is clear that Mr. Ashton is incredibly
affluent and works in a fancy office, but it’s not at all clear what he does for a living), and he insists to her that
he’ll only consider hiring her if she gets her grades up and makes straight
A’s.

Hadley and Alicia form a quirky friendship out of their forced association
on the project, which is going to playgrounds in grade schools in poor
neighborhoods and interviewing the students while Hadley’s friend Warren (Eric
Michael Cole) films them — and in one chilling scene that shows the noblesse
oblige of the 1 percent Hadley
slips one of the poor Black kids they’re interviewing a $50 bill and, instead
of being horrified, Alicia tells her (maybe honestly, maybe hypocritically) what
a wonderful thing she’s just done. For several reels it’s a typical story about
a poor little not-so-rich girl worried about whether the rich will accept her
and whether she can ever really be part of their clique, and whether the pretty
but rather gauche-looking Alicia can make it with the girls and attract a
boyfriend (or more than one boyfriend) from their circle. In order to do this
she crashes one of Hadley’s parties — held at the home Hadley’s dad has bought
for her, with a circular front porch that practically becomes a character in
the movie itself — and starts helping herself to the plentiful booze and drugs.
She starts to slip off the rails, but the rails get greased for her when she
learns that though she’s been accepted to Colby’s law school, the school
doesn’t have a big enough budget to give her the financial aid she needs to be
able to afford it — and immediately she starts drinking, drugging and binging
full-time, to the point where in a neat role reversal Hadley has to assume the
reins of their school project in order to make sure it gets completed on time
and both their grades in the class are secure.

New Best Friend has one big flaw — it’s structured to parallel
Alicia’s downfall with Bonner’s investigation of her case, and some of the edits
are awfully abrupt — we cut from Alicia the party girl to Alicia the coma
patient with a breathing tube stuck in her nose, and back (at least in Citizen
Kane, a pretty obvious model
for this story’s structure, Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz were careful
to keep us aware of when we were
and whose point of view we were experiencing at any given moment) — but as
annoying as the constant flashing back gets, this is a genuinely powerful and
ambiguous movie in which we’re generally uncertain about both Alicia’s and Hadley’s characters and how we’re
supposed to feel about them. In other Lifetime movies this has just seemed like
sloppy scripting, but this time around it seems as if it’s what writer Strouse
and director Clarke-Williams intended — and it’s an indication of the power of this movie that most of the
debates about it on the imdb.com message boards have revolved around the morals
of the characters. Hadley seems at first to be your standard-issue spoiled rich
bitch, but her uncertain relationship with her father and her desperation to
please him gives her a degree of pathos — and Alicia is even more ambiguous,
seeming as Bonner delves deeper into his investigation to be less the naïve
little good girl she comes off as in the beginning but a woman with secrets and
an ability to manipulate the other characters to get their sympathy. At one
point she insists that she’s never had sex with a man — to which Susan, who
asked her The Question, says she’s had 42 different male partners — and later
Alicia and Susan get it on themselves, provoking jealousy from Julianne (who’s
African-American — essentially the daughter of one of the token Blacks in the 1
percent, proving that the capitalist elite may find racism, sexism and
homophobia useful divide-and-conquer strategies against the 99 percent but
doesn’t need them to maintain its power
and can let a few women, people of color and Queers into its ranks as long as
they behave), though it’s clear that for these people Lesbian sex is just an
expression of their polymorphous perversity and not either a lifestyle choice
or a “born this way” status.

Later Susan says she was molested by her father
and Alicia says, “Me, too, by dad number two, for five years” — indicating that
Alicia is actually manipulative and good at sucking for sympathy with whomever
she’s with. Alicia also makes a play for Hadley’s boyfriend Travis, justifying
it because Travis was complaining that Hadley had cheated on him with Warren
(their videographer), and there’s a sequence in which the characters are in
some sort of outdoor location on campus and Hadley takes a fall on a grating
while Travis is with Alicia telling her how honest he finds her, unlike
you-know-who. The payoff comes when Hadley misses a date with her father —
she’s used to him standing her up but this time he shows and Alicia, who’s
carefully kept his messages from reaching Hadley, turns up instead, has dinner
with him and practically flirts with him. Do they get it on or don’t they?
Strouse doesn’t tell us yes or no, but he’s obviously taken enough with her
that he offers her the job Hadley wanted and
also to pay for her to go to law school at his alma mater, Stanford — and Hadley, whose own relationship
with her dad seems to echo that between Natalie Wood’s character in Rebel Without
a Cause and her father (namely, that he was so afraid of being
sexually attracted to her he wouldn’t even touch her in ordinarily legitimate
ways), has a jealous hissy-fit. She scores 100 percent pure
pharmaceutical-grade cocaine from an orderly in the hospital where she was
being treated for her fall — he’s tall and a bit dorky but not bad-looking and,
of course, sex (or the offer of sex) is the lure Hadley uses to get him to do
her bidding — then sneaks it into one of the multicolored envelopes in which
the local drug dealer puts his considerably weaker (20 percent pure) cocaine
product, puts it in a stash in her dresser that Alicia was used to stealing
from, and Alicia does the whole packet and goes into a coma. (Hadley later
explains she didn’t want to kill Alicia, just to make her dad see that Alicia
wasn’t the goody-two-shoes he thought and therefore was unworthy of his help.)

Bonner figures all this out because the medical examiner recovered residue from
Alicia’s nose showing that the “hot” dose was pure cocaine and not the usual
street product, and that gives him the clue he needs to unravel the whole case
— despite the efforts of the college dean (Edmund Kearney), whose “pull” with
the City Council will decide whether Bonner gets hired as the sheriff
full-time, to get him to call off his investigation because the town gets 90
percent of its tax revenue from the college and its students, and anything that
discredits the college and makes the rich parents less likely to send their
kids there is going to hurt the town. So in a way New Best Friend is a story of two people — Alicia and Bonner —
both of whom are aware in no uncertain terms that in order to get ahead they
have to suck up to the super-rich, only Alicia tries to deal with them from a
position of deceit while Bonner retains his integrity, pursues his
investigation to the end and ultimately resigns as acting sheriff in a
handing-over-his-badge scene much like the ending of Dirty Harry — after he does the Law and Order thing and arrests Hadley right after she receives
her degree in Colby’s graduation ceremony, the most publicly embarrassing place
he can take her into custody. It’s a surprisingly effective film that works on
many levels (though it’s clear from the imdb.com reviews that a considerable
amount of the original’s soft-core porn lubricity was cut from the Lifetime
version): as a tale of school friendships gone horribly awry, a just-say-no
movie (in the earlier scenes Alicia, the dedicated, non-partying student,
reminded me of me) and a parable of class and class consciousness reflecting an
F. Scott Fitzgerald-ish love-hate relationship towards the rich.

I showed The River, Pare Lorentz’ other movie (at least virtually the only other one
anybody’s seen!), his 1937 documentary (though for some reason imdb.com dates
it as 1938) for the Farm Security Administration, which had absorbed the
Resettlement Administration (for which he’d made The Plow That Broke the
Plains) when the focus of the
Roosevelt Administration’s response to the Dust Bowl crisis shifted from
getting the farmers to relocate to helping them stay there and learn to farm
the land responsibly and minimize soil erosion. The River was mocked when it was new (and has been ridiculed
since) for the incantatory style of Lorentz’s narration (delivered again, as in
Plow, by Thomas Chalmers, who
speaks in the earnest style of the narrators of “audio-visual” movies used in
schools in the 1960’s — in fact one person who reviewed The River on imdb.com actually recalled seeing it for the
first time as an “audio-visual” movie in high school!), especially when he
starts reading off all the names of the tributaries of the Mississippi, the
titular river and the subject of the film: “The Yellowstone, the Milk, the
White, the Cheyenne; the Cannonball, the Muscle Shoals, the James, the Sioux;
down the Judith, and the Osage, and the Platte; the Skunk, the Salt, the Black,
and Minnesota; down the Rock, and the Illinois, and the Kankakee; the
Allegheny, the Monongahela, Penawba and the Muskegon; down the Miami and the
Wabash and the Lickee and the Green; the Cumberland and the Kentucky and the
Tennessee; down the Wachita, the Wichita, the Red and Yazoo; down the Missouri,
3,000 miles from the Rockies; down the Ohio, 1,000 miles from the Alleghenies;
down the Arkansas, 1,500 miles from the Great Divide; down the Red, 1,000 miles
from Texas; down the Great Valley, 2,500 miles from Minnesota, carrying every
rivulet and brook, creek and rill.”

Typical of the commentary on this film is
Arthur Calder-Marshall’s rather snippy reference to it, Lorentz’s other film The
Plow That Broke the Plains, and
John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath: “[B]oth Steinbeck and Lorentz had shied away from the stark horror [of
the Dust Bowl migration], the former into romantic sentiment and the latter
into an incantatory use of Indian names. The sordid suffering was covered in
the aspic of Art.” It’s interesting to note that despite Lorentz’ use of all
the other major creative personnel from Plow on The River — himself, narrator Chalmers, composer Virgil Thomson (whose score is
absolutely brilliant, surpassing his excellent work on Plow, despite his use of two schlocky pseudo-folk songs; in one sequence he uses a banjo
with orchestral accompaniment to underscore shots of a riverboat, and Charles
joked that it was probably the most “serious” piece of music ever composed that
used the banjo) and conductor Alexander Smallens — none of the cinematographers from Plow (not even Paul Ivano, the only one of the four on Plow who lasted to the end) worked on The River. Instead the cinematographers on The River were Floyd Crosby (already an Academy Award winner
for the F. W. Murnau/Robert Flaherty semi-documentary Tabu in 1931, and the father of rock musician David
Crosby), Willard Van Dyke and Stacy Woodard, and Crosby’s influence on the
visual style is readily apparent from his off-beat angling and heavy use of the
red filter.

The River — even
in the context of a photographically lousy print from archive.org — is a quite
beautiful film, especially haunting in its images of the river itself. Its
basic moral is the same as that of Plow: the catastrophes of nature in the Midwest and South — the Dust Bowl of
Plains and the Mississippi River
floods here — are the fault of human beings meddling with nature in chancy,
catch-as-catch-can ways, but the solution is not to leave nature alone and with minimal
interference, but to remodel it in even more extensive, but carefully planned,
ways. In what up until its last five minutes or so has been a hymn to nature
and a condemnation of human efforts to tame it, we suddenly start seeing entire
cliffsides blow up and Chalmers’ narration makes it clear we are supposed to
approve. The last few minutes of The River are out-and-out propaganda supporting the Tennessee Valley Authority,
and the shots of the TVA’s network of dams being built are among the most
awe-inspiring in the film even though they bring Lorentz’s style even closer to
what in the U.S.S.R. was being called “socialist realism” than it’s been
throughout the previous 25 minutes (and all of Plow as well, where for all Lorentz’ clear veneration
of Eisenstein, his editing was a good deal sloppier — at one point he cut from
shots of the Great Plains to a series of explosions from cannons, and while
Chalmers’ narration quickly makes it clear these scenes are supposed to
illustrate World War I in progress, for a moment the juxtaposition makes it
look like the Plains have come under enemy artillery fire).

Like The Plow
That Broke the Plains, The River is a real period piece, sometimes incredibly beautiful (particularly
when the images from Crosby and company and Thomson’s music fuse just right)
and sometimes banal, and politically problematic now when the U.S. has largely
soured on big-ticket efforts to remake nature — and the Left, to which Lorentz
clearly belong, is probably sourer on them than anyone else! A TVA-like
development would be politically impossible today because the Right would
insist that it be done by the private sector and the Left would fight against
it being done at all; at least one of the reasons President Obama’s “stimulus”
didn’t have the kind of economic “juice” the WPA did was that both
environmental and business opposition to major public-sector construction
projects had become so entrenched there were woefully few jobs that were really
“shovel-ready” — in the 1930’s government had essentially said, “Damn the
corporations, damn the environment, full speed ahead,” but at least since the
1970’s that kind of rapid development has been well-nigh impossible (as much as
the Right likes to call for it, especially in energy). Lorentz’s films are, ironically, “timeless” in their
depiction of environmental catastrophes and very much of their time in terms of what they say we should do
about them — and it’s for both of those reasons that they remain interesting.

Friday, November 23, 2012

The film was Fifty
Million Frenchmen, a really peculiar 1931
Warner Bros. production that actually began life as a Cole Porter musical on
Broadway in 1929 — and Warner Bros., looking at the grosses of the previous Porter
musical Paris and also at the enormous
audience for just about any film that featured singing and dancing, put up
either all or part of the production cost (sources differ) in exchange for the
movie rights. But by the time they were ready to film it in 1931, the bottom
had dropped out of the musical-movie market and so Fifty Million Frenchmen hit the screen as a nonmusical farce-comedy with
slapstick overtones, and Porter got a screen credit (along with the original
book writers, Herbert Fields and E. Ray Goetz) but none of his tunes were
actually sung in the film, though some (including the show’s two big hits,
“You’ve Got That Thing” and “You Do Something to Me”) were heard in the movie’s
overture and under the printed titles that covered the original stage
version’s changes of scene. Oddly, though Warner Bros. took out the film’s
songs, they hired three of the actors from the original stage production —
William Gaxton, Helen Broderick (she made her screen debut here and didn’t make
another feature-length film until her memorable turn as the second female lead
in the Astaire-Rogers classic Top Hat four years later) and Lester Crawford (Broderick’s real-life husband —
their son Broderick Crawford became a bigger star than either of them, though
it’s difficult to imagine him as their progeny given what they look like here!)
— to repeat their roles in the film. Bereft of its songs and also the two-strip
Technicolor it was originally shot in — it’s yet another two-strip movie whose
extant prints are in black-and-white (though at least the actors’ makeup
doesn’t look as hideous as was the norm in black-and-white versions of
two-strip films) — Fifty Million Frenchmen emerges as a sporadically amusing but mostly dreary would-be comedy,
remodeled to feature the comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson.

They were
enormous Broadway stars (especially after 1938, when they debuted a madcap
revue called Hellzapoppin’ which was basically the ancestor of the 1960’s TV show Rowan and
Martin’s Laugh-In: it featured a large cast
and a lot of flamboyantly unreal situations, including a famous gag in which a
woman would be seen by theatergoers carrying a small potted plant and calling
out to someone named Oscar; at periodic intervals she’d walk through the
theatre calling, “Oscar! OSCAR!” and each time the plant would be larger, until
as the audience left they’d see her in the lobby, nestled in the branches of a
potted tree, still screaming, “OSCAR!”) but they made only nine feature films,
three for Warners in 1930-31, two for Republic in 1936-37 and four for
Universal in 1941-45. (The Universal films are generally considered their best
but are almost never shown today — any hopes they’d had for ongoing movie
stardom were dashed by the almost simultaneous appearance of Abbott and
Costello on the Universal lot — and they even made fun of that in their second
Universal film, Crazy House, in which they show up at Universal ready to make a follow-up to the
movie version of Hellzapoppin’ and get on the intercom of the production head to announce,
“Universal’s number one comedy team is here!” He replies, “Send Abbott and
Costello right in!” I’m still hoping Universal Home Video will release the four
films together in a boxed set the way they did with the first four Bob
Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies.)

Fifty Million Frenchmen is a
typical Broadway story about love and money among the upper set — in this case,
as the title suggests, American tourists in Paris. Jack Forbes (William Gaxton)
is the son of a wealthy family who’s attracted to Lu Lu Carroll (Claudia Dell),
another rich American in the French capital, but he’s also trying to shake off
Marcelle Dubrey (Carmelita Geraghty), a Frenchwoman with whom he had a
shipboard romance she obviously took a lot more seriously than he did. She demands
a 10,000-franc settlement to leave him alone and the cash-poor (even though he
has a line of credit available) Jack accepts a loan from his friend Michael
Cummings (John Halliday) to pay off Marcelle. But Michael and a third person in
their party, Billy Baxter (Lester Crawford), insist as a condition of their
loan that Jack must live for two weeks in Paris without any money at all other
than what he can earn in whatever jobs he can get during that time. They
sweeten the deal with a $50,000 bet and hire two American detectives, Simon
(Ole Olsen) and Peter (Chic Johnson) — one wonders if the Biblical names were a
deliberate joke either on the part of the original writers or Joseph Jackson
and Eddie Welch, who wrote the screenplay — to follow Jack and see that he
doesn’t cheat on the terms of the deal. There really isn’t much more plot to it
than that, though the basic situation sets up some interesting gags — in one of
which Jack, needing an evening coat for a party Lu Lu is attending, wins one by
playing a game of strip poker with the obnoxious kid (Norman Phillips, Jr.) of
a couple (Nat Carr and Vera Gordon) he’s been squiring around Paris in a
short-lived job as a guide for American Express (it wasn’t always just a
credit-card company!), only it’s too small for him.

There is one song in the movie, a comic number Jack, Simon and
Peter do in the detective’s hotel room (which of course comes equipped with a
piano), but it’s so crude it’s impossible to believe it’s Porter’s work and
more likely Olsen and Johnson wrote it themselves. (“The Laughing Song,” a
composition of theirs from their previous movie, Oh, Sailor, Behave!, had been a surprise hit.) There’s also a scene
reminiscent of Chaplin’s The Pawnshop in which Jack, about to be thrown out of the hotel for non-payment of
his bill, disguises himself as the famous magician Orizon (Bela Lugosi, in one
of only two color films he ever made — alas, this one doesn’t survive in color
and the other one, the 1947 film Scared to Death, does) and gives a show that ends up with him
demolishing a rich guest’s heirloom watch and scrambling it inside a top hat
with an egg. The big highlight of the movie is another scene ripped off of an
earlier and greater comedian — in this case, an intriguing variant of Buster
Keaton’s Cops (and indeed it’s tempting
to imagine how much funnier this movie would have been with the Great Stone
Face playing Gaxton’s role!) in which Billy Baxter, who wants Lu Lu for
himself, has hired two thugs to kidnap Jack. Simon and Peter are following — on
foot, even though the kidnapers have a car — and after them is coming virtually
the whole gendarmerie, alerted
by the hotel manager (Charles Judels) who claims they’ve stolen a purse. The
chase scene hits a patch of street that’s been oiled, so the participants slip
and slide; and then another part that’s just been tarred, so they get stuck and
move in slow motion, and the sequence is funny enough that the inevitable happy
ending (Jack and Lu Lu get together, he gets access to his money again, and he gives
the bet money to Simon and Peter, who tear up their return ticket to the U.S.
and decide to stay in Paris on the ground that “fifty million Frenchmen can’t
be wrong,” the only
reference to the famous saying that gives the film its title) just seems anticlimactic.

There’s also a scene in which, in order to trick Jack out of what little money
he’s been able to amass, he meets him at a racetrack and tells him to bet on a
no-talent horse named Pansy — who wins the race, then is faced with
disqualification, then isn’t disqualified after all but in the meantime Jack
has torn up his and Lu Lu’s tickets on him so he doesn’t get the winnings
(though Helen Broderick has sent him to pick up the proceeds of her bet on Pansy and this momentarily gives Lu Lu the
impression that he’s involved with another woman) — and a cute scene earlier on
in which Broderick’s character, Violet (she’s essentially the heroine’s
sidekick the way she was with Ginger Rogers in her two films with Rogers and
Astaire), tells Jack, “I want to be insulted,” but it turns out that every
sexually racy thing he can think of to show her, including 3-D postcards and
live peep shows, she’s already done. Fifty Million Frenchmen is directed by Lloyd Bacon with rare vitality — at
least by his standards — and if the Porter songs had been included and the film
survived in color it would be a lot more enjoyable than it is; as it is, it’s
just another historical curio with an oddly homely leading man (Gaxton would
play leads on Broadway for another decade but it’s readily apparent why he
never became a film star — he’s stout, homely and has a grating speaking voice
that makes me wonder how he negotiated Porter’s songs in the stage version and
again in Anything Goes) and a
comedy team that wouldn’t really hit their stride for another seven years.
(Another Olsen and Johnson anecdote: during the film of Hellzapoppin’ they wander through several sets at Universal, and
in one of them they see, hanging from the prop wall, a sled called “Rosebud.”
They were almost certainly the first people to parody Citizen Kane.) Ironically, it would be this film’s director,
Lloyd Bacon, who would direct 42nd Street, the film that would restore musicals to
popularity, two years later.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

For last night’s “feature” I ran Charles Two Sisters from
Boston, an obscure but surprisingly
charming MGM musical, produced by Joe Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster
(the same team who had made Deanna Durbin a star with Three Smart
Girls at Universal in 1936, a decade before
this 1946 film) and starring Kathryn Grayson and June Allyson as the title
characters. The film is set in 1900 and begins at a staid tea party in Boston,
given by the Chandler family, where Martha Canford Chandler (June Allyson) is
playing piano in a terminally dull chamber work and everything is going along
at a snail’s pace of “correct” tedium when an officious young man announces to
Martha’s uncle Jonathan (Harry Hayden) and aunt Jennifer (Isobel Elsom) — this
seems to be yet another one of those movies in which teenagers have been palmed
off on their aunt and uncle, presumably because their parents died — that the
family’s name has been hopelessly disgraced. Both the dialogue and the demeanor
of the actor’s performance (he’s nice-looking and a quite powerful performer,
so it’s a real pity that we don’t see him again) are so reminiscent of a film
from four years earlier in which Tim Holt played a young man equally upset with
real or imagined blots on his family’s reputation that I immediately joked,
“Ah, The Magnificent Ambersons —
the musical!” No such luck, but the plot that did develop from this is quite witty in its own right.
It seems that the big scandal that threatens to disgrace the Chandler family
and cost uncle Jonathan his chance to be elected mayor of Boston is that
Martha’s sister Abigail (Kathryn Grayson) is working as a nightclub entertainer
at a sleazy spot called the Golden Rooster in the Bowery district of New York.
The Chandlers immediately set out for New York to find out if this is true and,
if it is, to pull Abigail from that unhealthy environment and drag her back to
Boston post-haste. Next we’re taken to the Golden Rooster, where Abigail is
billed as “High-C Susie” in a show MC’d and led from the piano by “Spike”
(Jimmy Durante, who looks startling at first because he has much more hair than
we’re used to seeing on him, but later we find out it’s a toupée when he takes
it off and reveals the typical Durante scraggle), singing songs as raunchy as
composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Ralph Freed could make them in a Production
Code-era movie and showing off her legs (‘her limbs,’ the shocked Chandlers say in disgust).

When her
folks from Boston come to visit, Abigail hatches a scheme to make them think
she’s actually appearing in the opera — and when they find a slip of paper on
the floor of her room with the name “The Golden Rooster” written on it, she
convinces them it’s really the name of an opera, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le
Coq d’Or (which wasn’t written until 1907,
seven years after this film supposedly takes place). The Chandlers immediately
announce that they’re going to buy a ticket to that very night’s opera
performance so they can see Abigail — which leaves her the task of bribing,
flirting or bulling her way through onto the opera stage. She does that with
the help of “Spike,” whose modus operandi throughout the whole film is to whisper something in the ear of the
person he’s trying to influence — some deep dark secret he supposedly knows
about them — and invariably he hits on a location they were in when they did do something they wouldn’t want the world to know
about, and says his lips will be sealed if only they will … He manages to get
Abigail into the chorus of an opera (a rather lame faux-opera concocted by Charles Previn, the music
director, and Wilhelm von Wymetal, the opera director who got the call for a
lot of Hollywood’s forays into the operatic world — and who “Anglicized” his
name and is billed as “William Wymetal” here), where she steps out and
embarrasses herself and everyone else (though she impresses her family) by breaking
into a few coloratura bits in the middle of the big aria sung by tenor Olstrom
(Lauritz Melchior, the main reason I wanted to see this — not surprisingly, his
singing is acceptable in the faux-opera
bits but comes to life when he can actually sing Wagner, the bridal-chamber
duet between Lohengrin and Elsa in English translation and the Prize Song from Meistersinger in the original German, in a sequence supposedly
representing a recording session) and getting herself barred from the opera
house — to which she only got invited in the first place because “Spike” had
dropped hints she was the mistress of Patterson (Thurston Hall).

Meanwhile,
Patterson’s son (Peter Lawford) has fallen in love with Martha, and the plot
spirals out of control into complications that end with Martha claiming that she is “High C Susie” from the Golden Rooster (and
having to go on stage with a refractory non-voice to prove it!), Patterson fils being shocked that his new girlfriend would do
something so unbecoming and socially embarrassing, “Spike” hatching a new
scheme to get Abigail (back) into the opera by presenting her at a social event
being given by Patterson père and
his wife (Nella Walker) — which means he has to figure out a way to persuade
Olstrom, the guest of honor, not to attend (the moment he recognized Abigail he
would presumably order her out of there), along with an amnesiac butler at the
Patterson home (Ben Blue) who’s also a regular at the Golden Rooster and
therefore could also “out” Abigail, but he’s no threat if he’s kept sober
(since, at least according to this script, alcohol consumption gets his memory
to work again) — and there’s a final sequence in which Olstrom is starring in
another faux-opera called Marie
Antoinette, he’s playing Louis XVI (he’s
listed in the poster for this opera as a baritone even though Melchior was a
tenor) and Abigail (under a pseudonym) is going to play Marie Antoinette, and
she thinks she’s got away with her disguise until her costumer takes off her
wig for alterations, Olstrom recognizes her instantly, at first refuses to sing
with her but later relents, Abigail gets the opera career she’s wanted all
along (she only took the job at the Golden Rooster in the first place to make
money to pay for singing lessons, and unlike Jeanette MacDonald in San
Francisco and Dorothy Patrick in New
Orleans, she doesn’t discover a hot new kind of popular music she wants
to bring to the concert hall) and Patterson, Jr. gets Martha. It’s not much in
synopsis, but Myles Connolly’s script (with additional dialogue by James
O’Hanlon and Harry Crane) is a good one, full of witty bits (including the
sequence in which Olstrom’s dog, Tristan, hears the playback of Olstrom’s
record, assumes the classic RCA Victor/HMV trademark pose, and one of the
recording engineers gapes in awe and says, “His master’s voice … ”) and enough
variations on the old clichés we’re really not sure how it’s all going to turn
out.

And for those who wonder how a screen teaming between Lauritz Melchior and
Jimmy Durante would turn out, well, he’d earlier been teamed with Tommy Dorsey
and Buddy Rich in a previous MGM musical (Thrill of a Romance, also a Pasternak production) and he seemed to be
having a good time through the whole thing — in fact, around this time Melchior
was briefly signed with MGM Records as well as making films for the parent
studio. He’s properly avuncular and temperamental, but the film does do justice
to his voice (at least in the Wagner segments), and the depiction of a 1900
recording session was accurate in part (the master record is recorded on a zinc
blank which can be put immediately into a metal bath and played back — later
wax blanks were used, which sounded better but required major off-site
processing and couldn’t be listened to for about three weeks after the record
was made — and the producer of the session is shown pulling Melchior back when
he’s about to sing loudly and pushing him closer to the recording horn when he
sings softly — this was so the record would reproduce at an even volume and a
loud note wouldn’t cause the cutting stylus to vibrate so violently that it
would slice through the adjoining grooves, ruining the record) and
anachronistic in part (he’s accompanied by a small orchestra, with string
players using normal instruments instead of Stroh violins — though in 1900 the
frequency range that could be recorded was so narrow most opera records were
made with no instruments at all except a piano). I hadn’t had much hope for
this movie — I was mainly watching it as a relatively minor Melchior credit in
between the Esther Williams Technicolor extravaganzae Thrill of a
Romance and This Time for Keeps — but it turned out to be graceful, witty and
genuinely charming, a triumph of style over (lack of) substance and yet more
evidence that Henry Koster was a genuinely creative director and not just
another studio hack.

In the wake of the Ken Burns
mini-series The Dust Bowl I had downloaded from archive.org Pare Lorentz’s 1936 film The Plow
That Broke the Plains, a 25-minute documentary
produced by the U.S. government back when Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress
Administration (WPA) had hired people not only to dig ditches and build
bridges, highways and government buildings (many of them still in use today!)
but to do some pretty far-afield things like put on plays, write books (mostly
travel guidebooks giving the histories and listing the attractions of some of
America’s historic regions) and make movies. The Burns show had mentioned this
film and had said that when it was shown in the still-operating movie theatres
in the Dust Bowl region itself, audiences hadn’t liked it, partly because they
went to the movies to escape the reality instead of watching it bigger than life on screen, and
partly because they felt insulted by it since the film essentially blamed the
Dust Bowl crisis on the farmers themselves for plowing up too much marginal
land and expecting to make a living out of farming wheat in places with big
winds, hot sun and very little rain.

Ironically, the Ken Burns documentary
basically told the same story from the same point of view, though it had nearly
four hours to tell it in versus Pare Lorentz’ 25 minutes; Lorentz’ take on it
goes back at least to the 1890’s and the battles between cattlemen and
homesteaders over the future of the Great Plains, which have been the subject
of innumerable Westerns (from Oklahoma! and Shane to Heaven’s Gate); first the cattlemen moved in after the land was
“cleared” (an astonishing euphemism showing that even a man as self-consciously
Leftist as Lorentz wasn’t immune to the prejudices of his time) of the Indians
and the buffalo, and grazed their herds on the native grasses that had
previously supported the buffalo (and the Native Americans who depended on them
for food, clothing and
shelter!); then the farmers came in and their plows started to break the plains
(the marvelously punning title — “broke” in the sense of opening the soil for
tilling and planting, and “broke” in the sense of destroying — is one of the
best things about this film) and they started eking out a marginal existence;
then World War I opened up huge new markets for wheat and the plains farmers
took advantage of the war-driven boom (and the bubble-driven boom of the 1920’s
which followed) and a decade or so of really good rainfall to plant wheat and
harvest bumper crops which they could sell for a lot of money; then the
national economy collapsed in 1929 and the farm ecology of the Plains states
collapsed two years later, leading to the Dust Bowl and the catastrophe Lorentz
and his squad of four cinematographers — Leo T. Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, Paul
Strand and Paul Ivano — captured in images of heart-stopping beauty and horror
even in the poor-quality print available on archive.org. (According to a
“trivia” note on imdb.com, all the camerapeople except Ivano — perhaps not
coincidentally, the only one who’d had Hollywood experience; he’d worked on
Valentino’s films in the 1920’s and made a comeback in the 1940’s as a noir specialist — walked out on the production because
they wanted a more visually oriented, less narration-driven approach than
Lorentz’s.)

What’s most amazing about The Plow That Broke the Plains today is its obvious debt to the films of the
Soviet Union, Eisenstein’s in particular (but then this was an era in which
virtually every progressive filmmaker in the world regarded Eisenstein as a
god; I can remember Charles and I watching John Grierson’s first film, the 1929
silent documentary Drifters, and noting its obvious debt to Battleship Potemkin even though the sailors in Eisenstein’s film were
starting a revolution while the ones in Grierson’s were just catching herring);
it’s essentially a work of socialist realism done in and about the U.S. Even
the rather emphatic narration by Thomas Chalmers (not exactly one of the golden
throats of the day) has the air of the Popular Front about it, its attempt to
communicate the ideas of the Left in the folksy tones its city-bred creators
hoped would make the point to rural audiences (and the narration got awfully
patronizing and preachy at times but it still marks a time when the Left actually tried to reach out to middle America in general and
rural America in particular instead of regarding it as hopelessly beyond the
pale).

The most famous element of The Plow That Broke the Plains (and of Lorentz’s follow-up, the 1937 documentary The
River, about the Mississippi) is
the original musical score by Virgil Thomson, conducted by Alexander Smallens
(who also conducted the world premiere production of Porgy and Bess), which essentially is in what could be called the
“Americana” vein of Aaron Copland except that Thomson was writing that way
before Copland was. Thomson even uses the same Western folk song, “I Ride an
Old Paint,” that Copland used in the slow “Saturday Night Waltz” section of his
ballet Rodeo six years later. The
Plow That Broke the Plains is
visually stunning (it’s a hymn to the effectiveness of the red filter, a device
that alas became unusable once color replaced black-and-white as the movie
standard), narratively creaky, musically fascinating (Leopold Stokowski made a
famous LP of the scores for this and The River and more recently the films have been reissued on
DVD with Smallens’ versions of the scores erased and new recordings of Thomson’s
music dubbed in) and a real period piece even though Ken Burns not only showed
the opening credits in The Dust Bowl but also included, as if it were actual newsreel footage, the shots of
a farmer (Bam White) and his family packing up their meager goods in their car
and trailer before setting off to flee the Dust Bowl.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

I watched a 2002 movie called Unfaithful that I had recorded off Lifetime on June 24 (just
one day after John Primavera, my friend and home-care client of nearly 30
years, died suddenly) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane, who reunited for a
much better film called Nights in Rodanthe just six years later. Unfaithful was a U.S. remake of a 1969 French movie called La Femme
Infidèle (“The Unfaithful Wife”), written
by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles, Jr. from the original French screenplay
by Claude Chabrol (who also directed the French version); this one was directed
by Adrian Lyne, who despite his réclame from having made Fatal Attraction in 1987 hasn’t directed a film in the 10 years since Unfaithful (though his imdb.com page lists something called Back
Roads as being in pre-production). It’s the
sort of movie that’s so evidently trying for Seriousness with a capital “S”
that it’s heartbreaking to see it go awry at almost every turn. After a
prologue of boringly banal suburban domesticity, it starts in New York City on
a windy day (which makes it rather appropriate watching in the wake ofHurricane or Superstorm or
whatchamacallit Sandy), in which suburban housewife Connie Sumner (Diane Lane)
takes a bad fall on the street and is rescued by Paul Martel (Olivier
Martinez), who runs a seedy little used bookstore and apparently lives in a
flat above the store in the same building, and takes a lot of his stock home
with him since the place is virtually filled with bookshelves containing such
treasures as a first-edition copy of Jack London’s White Fang with the original dust jacket (did they have dust jackets back then?) which he proudly tells her
he bought for $1.50 and is worth $4,000. Paul is your typical movie French
seducer with the bad accent — he fractures English even worse than Charles
Boyer (whom he’s obviously mimicking) ever did — and Connie is inexplicably
drawn to his combination of gorgeous looks and bad attitude.

We’ve already seen
the suburban domesticity she’s longing for an escape from — hubby Ed (Richard
Gere) and 10-year-old son Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan) in a big, sterile house —
and Ed’s having career problems which are never quite explained (at least in
the Lifetime version — it’s clear some major surgery was done on this movie to
make it fit for basic cable: the “memorable quotes” section on imdb.com
includes Ed chewing out Connie with the F-word after he’s discovered her affair
with Paul — “How you fucked him over and over and over? You lied to me over and
over and over. … You threw it all away like it was nothing. For what? To a
fucking kid!” — which of course we heard neither hide nor hair of in this
bowdlerized Lifetime version) but we’re told briefly that he owns a fleet of
trucks and he’s recently bought 200 more of them but he can’t run them because
some authority has imposed a “suspension” on him that he’s having to fight in
court. Maybe the original French version was better (though it’s not like I’m
actively going to seek it out) but the U.S. one is all too soaked in America’s
peculiarly mixed attitude towards sex, in which we’re at once titillated by and
condemnatory of those who “cheat” (itself an awfully loaded term for something
that’s often a simple, basic expression of our humanity!), resulting in a movie
like this in which the guilt feelings of the characters (the American ones, at
any rate) are part of the plot. About the one thing Lyne, Sargent and Broyles
get right is the clash between
the French and the American attitudes towards extra-relational sex: Paul thinks
it’s no big deal and nobody’s business but his and his partners’ whom he has
sex with; Ed not only guesses his wife is having an affair but hires a private
detective to tail her and take surveillance photos of her and Paul together;
and even Connie gets ridiculously possessive and flails at Paul and his
alternate girlfriend (Murielle Arden) when she catches them necking in between
the shelves in his bookstore.

The movie rambles on for about half its running
time with Connie making more and more preposterous excuses for getting away to
be with Paul, building up the suspense over how Ed is going to find out for sure
about the affair and what’s going to happen when the two men confront each
other — which finally occurs in Paul’s upstairs apartment, where Lyne’s camera
gives us a shot from Ed’s point of view as his gaze travels through the studio
room, alights on the bed where his wife made love with that person, then notices a crystal snow-globe, picks it
up and says, “Rosebud” — oops, wrong movie. Ed recognizes the snow-globe, asks
Paul where he got it, and when Paul says, “Your wife gave it to me,” Ed gets
furious, says, “I gave it to her!,”
picks it up and clobbers Paul in the head with it (and of course Lyne can’t
resist copping Orson Welles’ famous shot of the snow-globe hitting the floor
and rolling towards the camera in extreme close-up, though this time it doesn’t shatter — it has to remain intact to set up one last
plot twist towards the end). It’s the sort of movie assault where it looks like
Paul just suffered a light tap on the head, enough to draw blood but hardly
life-threatening, but we’re told
the blow was instantly fatal — and, as in Gere’s star-making film, American
Gigolo, the mid-film murder blasts this
movie from the realm of the merely mediocre to the out-and-out campy-bad. We’re
rooting (at least I was!) for Ed
to come to his senses and call 911 — obviously he’s better off being charged
with assault than ultimately arrested for murder — and he actually picks up
Paul’s phone, presses the “9” and then the “1,” but idiotically draws back from
pressing “1” again and instead starts wiping every surface he’s touched to
avoid leaving fingerprints. He wraps Paul’s body up in a carpet, seals it with
duct tape (he’s beginning to look as if he’s auditioning for America’s
Stupidest Criminals), and drags it into the
building’s elevator — which sticks — and when he finally gets himself and the
body out of the building he’s accosted by a passer-by (a witness!). He packs the body into the trunk of his car and
eventually disposes of it in what looks like either a construction site or a
dump — only it’s found and the police start investigating. The film ends with
Ed and Connie having been brought back together by her husband’s murdering her
lover; they’re sitting in their car (with their son in the back seat, maybe
asleep, maybe awake) and as the film ends they talk about relocating to an
island, assuming other identities, and hiding out for the rest of their lives —
an annoyingly inconclusive ending which Lyne insisted on.

The studio (20th
Century-Fox, producing in partnership with companies called Regency and Epsilon
— that’s right, this isn’t a “B”-movie, it’s an “E”-movie!) wanted it to end
with Ed getting out of the car — which is parked in front of a police station —
and turning himself in, which would have made a lot more sense both dramatically and morally; for once a
studio was right about a movie and its director was wrong! There’s certainly
some novelty value in Unfaithful,
if only because we expect that in a movie about adultery with Richard Gere as
the star he’s going to be the cuckolder instead of the cuckoldee, but the moral
attitudes of the story are all wrong, Olivier Martinez’s English accent is a
thing of ugliness and a horror to behear, and Adrian Lyne could give the usual
Lifetime hacks lessons in how to ruin a movie by overdirection: in one scene Ed
is shown getting off the commuter train at Grand Central Station, and there’s
none of the pushing and shoving and jockeying for position we’ve seen in just
about every other movie showing this sort of scene. Instead, the passengers,
all virtually identically dressed males in ugly suits, get off the train in
unison with the smooth, well-rehearsed precision of a Busby Berkeley chorus
line. What’s most interesting in Unfaithful is how its moral attitudes exemplify the sexual
counter-revolution: in the 1930’s a plot like this would mostly likely have
ended with the woman (not her
husband!) killing the lover and suffering picturesquely before she’s taken away
and punished in the final reels; in the 1970’s movies like An
Unfinished Woman took this basic situation
and presented adultery as a form of women’s liberation from the stultifying
reality of a suburban marriage; by 2002 the pendulum had swung again and the
story is once again ridden with guilt and angst (in what Sargent and Broyles obviously thought was irony, Ed kills Paul just before Connie
leaves a message on Paul’s phone, which Ed hears, saying she’s going to break
off the affair because “I just can’t do this anymore”) and, despite his
murderous overreaction, our sympathies are clearly with the husband.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

I put on the first half of The Dust Bowl, Ken Burns’ latest slice of elegiac American history
from PBS — oddly, KPBS was showing it at 8 p.m. and then repeating the whole
program immediately afterwards at 10 — and I had set the DVD recorder to record
it on the first go-round but caught it “live” on the second. Burns’ vision of
the Dust Bowl is not merely a freak set of accidents that caught the farmers of
Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado unawares but a man-made environmental
disaster of terrific scope, the end of a 50-year process in which overly
optimistic farmers bought the propaganda of greedy land merchants and set up
stakes in an arid area — not really desert but not all that good arable land
either — then chewed it up with their plows and took advantage of a few good,
rainy years until the rains stopped just about the same time as the national
economy collapsed completely, in 1931 (until then the plains were producing
bumper crops of wheat and the farmers were pretty much insulated from the effects
of the Depression), and farmers responded to falling prices by planting more
and more wheat, thereby just digging their holes deeper because rising supply
meant prices fell even further.

The Dust Bowl is an obvious cautionary tale for
today — the failure of just about everyone in American politics and economics
to respond to the potential catastrophe of human-caused climate change is the
obvious modern parallel, especially since instead of working on a transition to
renewable energy the U.S. is now boasting that it’s producing more fossil fuels
than ever before and is poised to become the world’s leading oil producer by
2020 (thanks to the insanely destructive “fracking” process) — but that’s a lot
clearer in the quote by Dust Bowl survivor Wayne Lewis on the PBS Web site than
Burns made it in the film itself (probably because he’s dependent for his
production money on the very giant corporations that are making money off the
economy the way it is and have no interest in the wrenching changes needed to stave
off global warming): “We want it now – and if it makes money now it’s a good
idea. But if the things we’re doing are going to mess up the future it wasn’t a
good idea. Don’t deal on the moment. Take the long-term look at things. It’s
important that we do the right thing by the soil and the climate. History, is
of value only if you learn from it.” What came through most strongly in The
Dust Bowl is the sheer orneriness of the
people who stuck it out year after year — one survivor called the residents of Oklahoma’s
thin sliver of land atop the Texas Panhandle, nicknamed “no-man’s land” and the
epicenter of the Dust Bowl, “next-year people” because no matter how hard they
were hit by whatever was going on that year, they were always convinced, or at
least held out the hope, that “next year” would be better. One New York
reporter who encountered the worst storm of the Dust Bowl — the big one on
April 14, 1935 (“Black Sunday”) — and actually coined the phrase, said that
farmers in the area lived by three words: “If it rains … ” Thanks largely to
the enduring popularity of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, our collective memory of the Dust Bowl and the
“Okies” focuses primarily on the people who left the region and desperately hit
the roads to seek their fortunes elsewhere — whereas Burns seems deliberately
trying to revise that history and make his focus the people who stayed,
who stuck it out and tried as best they could to weather (pardon the pun) the
crisis and bring their lives back to normal.

The Dust Bowl focuses on individuals like Caroline Henderson (who
settled in the Oklahoma “no-man’s land” as a single woman in 1906, married a
man she hired to dig wells on her property a year later, and contributed a
column called “The Homestead Lady” to what was then America’s most prestigious
magazine, The Atlantic Monthly) —
indeed, the only people listed on imdb.com’s cast listing are Carolyn
McCormack, who reads Henderson’s letters and columns on the show; Patricia
Clarkson, who does the same for another pioneer woman, Hazel Lucas Shaw; and
Peter Coyote, who narrates (as he’s done for most of the Burns movies since
David McCullough gave it up) — and for some reason the PBS Web site contains a
lot of background information on the film and some of the haunting still photos
used in it (apparently only two home movies of the big April 14, 1935 dust
cloud exist — evidence that these were people who even before the crisis were
making pretty marginal livings and couldn’t afford to film themselves) but does
not offer a cast and crew credits
list. It’s an intensely moving film but the individual stories come through
more strongly than the social lesson — and at the very end of part one there’s
a familiarly twangy voice telling a story about how he met some people who were
leaving the area because after years of living through the dust crisis they’d
finally given up. He remembered that as they took off, they said, “So long,
it’s been good to know yuh” — and the voice remembered how he had taken that
line and written a song around it. Then the voice, which of course belonged to
Woody Guthrie (this is from the series of recordings he made for the Library of
Congress, both as storyteller and singer), went into the song — and the Los
Angeles Times reviewer said that at that
point the movie perked up because pretty much all we’d been hearing musically
up to that point were doleful renditions of pioneer folk songs like “Home on
the Range” and “Shenandoah.” (I recalled to Charles getting the Woody Guthrie
CD reissue that contained one of his earliest songs, “A Picture from Life’s
Other Side,” and reflecting on the basis of that piece of bathos that if it
hadn’t been for the Dust Bowl Guthrie would have spent his entire career as a
mediocre Jimmie Rodgers imitator handicapped in that regard by his inability to
yodel.) — 11/19/12

•••••

Part two of The Dust Bowl was more of the same — intensely moving in its personal stories, a bit
muddled in its attempts to draw comparisons between the Dust Bowl and more
modern environmental catastrophes (it’s telling that KPBS showed the first part
right after a NOVA program about
Hurricane Sandy called “Inside the Megastorm,” a scheduling quirk which said
more about the commonality between the Dust Bowl and the big storms of the
2000’s than The Dust Bowl itself
did) and quite forthrightly (bothersomely so to conservative viewers — of the
three people who have posted reviews to imdb.com so far, one said that for 30
years Burns has been making these documentaries with an “agenda,” then added,
“If Burns were not affiliated with PBS I may view his documentaries more
open-mindedly” — giving away that he dislikes the movies at least in part
because conservative propagandists have told him to mistrust anything he sees on PBS) says that the Dust Bowl was a
failure of private enterprise and “The Market” and only government intervention was able to save the area
for agriculture. What’s most striking about the Dust Bowl is the extent to
which it followed a pattern that’s been repeated again and again and again in human history in general and American history in
particular: find a natural resource, exploit the hell out of it, then watch
helplessly as the resource collapses and nature responds against the arrogant
attempts of man to manipulate it for our own purposes.

We’ve seen it in the
vast exploitation of fossil fuels, in which like the Prodigal Son we ran
through our patrimony in about 150 years and rather than heed the warning signs
from nature that it’s time to get off our fossil-fuel “jones,” we’re delivering
ever more ferocious insults to the earth (including literally injecting it with toxic chemicals in what’s called
“hydraulic fracturing,” or “fracking” for short) to get the last shards of oil,
gas and the rocks containing them out of the earth so we can burn it ever more
quickly and thereby consign the human race to globally warmed oblivion even
sooner. We’ve seen it in the outright denial of human-caused climate change —
the percentage of Americans who believe human activities play a role in climate
change has plummeted from 71 percent in 2007 (the year Al Gore won the Academy
Award for An Inconvenient Truth)
to just 44 percent today — and we’ve heard radical-Right propagandists on talk
radio actually proclaim that as a political victory for their side. The Dust
Bowl had similar origins — farmers cultivated marginal land with destructive
means (particularly shifting from the Lister plow to a cheaper version that
turned the soil less deeply) and seized on a few relatively wet years to get
away with it until nature dried up the skies and the area’s endemic high winds
took the bone-dry soil with them — and the pattern, with land speculators and
so-called “Sunday farmers” (people who bought acreage in Oklahoma and the
states bordering it without actually visiting their land or knowing jack about
farming) bidding up the land in a classic bubble that, like all economic
bubbles, eventually burst, is all too much a part of how capitalism in general
and American capitalism in particular generally operates. One of the most
poignant stories in The Dust Bowl
is of the patriarch who mortgaged his own homestead in 1928 to buy enough land
so he could give each of his five sons (he had nine children altogether but he obviously intended his daughters to be taken care of by the
men they would marry) 640 acres, and instead he ended up living in a series of
houses he either got foreclosed out from under or had to rent.

What’s
fascinating about his tale is that on the one hand he had an idea of the
continuity of the generations and the need to plan ahead to secure the
well-being of his family past his own lifetime, but at the same time he was
attempting to do that by practicing the same kind of farming his neighbors
were, which was good at extracting value from the land in the short term but
ultimately destroyed it in the long term. We live in a country which, despite
its long-term attachment to a largely mythologized history, celebrates the new,
the quick, the short-term money-making strategy, which in our own time has
become the shibboleth of “shareholder value” and the idea that a business
enterprise is only worth what
people will pay to own stock in it, and any idea of building and maintaining a
viable business for the long term has fallen by the wayside. Mitt Romney and
his company, Bain Capital, was a pioneer in the idea that businesses were
merely poker chips in a giant speculative casino, that could be put together or
taken apart based on the immediate need (and greed) of financial speculators:
the idea of making a profit and
maintaining a viable business that preserves roots in a community and pays its
workers enough that they can afford its products is so-o-o-o-o 20th century. We’ve become a country that
blows up its mountains to obtain coal, injects the earth with toxic chemicals
to release oil and gas whose combustion will just speed up the environmental
apocalypse policymakers in both government and the corporate elites deny is
even happening, and crusades against any effective (or even not-so-effective) regulation of corporations in
general and the financial sector in particular on the ground that we must
“unleash the private sector” if we’re going to have shared prosperity. Seen
today, the story of the Dust Bowl is a microcosm of so many bad habits and
destructive policies that have become the orthodoxy of our time — Mitt Romney
may have lost the election, but he and his side long since won the ideological
war, to the point where the big debate in Washington as the so-called “fiscal
cliff” looms isn’t going to be whether to cut the social safety net (already shredded by years of
deregulatory hegemony in both major parties) but by how much, and whether the
top income tax rate (easily reduced by super-wealthy individuals) should be 35
or 39 percent — in the 1950’s it was 90 percent and in the 1960’s it was reduced to 70 percent (a
cut which the Right of the time, including the editors of the Reader’s
Digest, proclaimed as socially
irresponsible because it fostered inflation!), and Americans enjoyed a greater
level of shared prosperity than they do now.

The Dust Bowl suffers from the usual problems with Ken Burns’
documentaries — the sentimentalism and the elegiac tone (maybe the conservative
commentator to imdb.com had a point; like some of the later Roman historians,
Burns obviously works from a
point of view that says his country’s best days are behind it) — and the
personal stories are absolutely astonishing (the tale of Caroline Henderson,
who arrived in Oklahoma in 1906, set up a homestead as a single woman, married
a man she hired to help her dig a well a year later, and stayed on her farm
through boom, bust, disaster and recovery until 1965, when she reluctantly left
her land to live with her daughter, a doctor, in Idaho, would make a marvelous
dramatic film, an epic for the ages, and if there’s any actress out there who
wants the role of a lifetime and has the prestige and clout to set it up … )
but don’t always mesh that well with the social commentary. The second part
gets more into the federal response, which essentially relied on soil
scientists working out ways the plains land could be farmed effectively without
drying up and blowing away during severe and sustained droughts (they involved
contour plowing, which is a term that isn’t explained very
well in the movie; the Wikipedia page on it says it means “the farming practice of ploughing across a slope following its
elevation contour lines. The rows
form slow water run-off during rainstorms to prevent soil erosion and allow the
water time to settle into the soil. In contour ploughing, the ruts made by the
plow run perpendicular rather than parallel to slopes, generally resulting in
furrows that curve around the land and are level. A similar practice is contour
bunding, where stones are placed around
the contours of slopes” — though quite frankly in land as flat as the Oklahoma
and Kansas plains it’s hard, at least for someone like me who in Woody Allen’s
phrase is “at two with nature,” to tell where the natural slopes you’re supposed to contour or terrace
around are; they also included letting some of the land go back to its native
grass and planting trees to serve as natural windbreaks) and using a
combination of carrots and sticks to get farmers to use the new techniques,

One
of the fascinations of The Dust Bowl is
the ongoing tension — again, characteristic of American history in general —
between the ferocious idea of “independence” (there are plenty of stories here,
as in just about every era of American history and in particular every economic
and social crisis, of people drawing back at receiving government help because
they were “too proud” to admit that they needed it) and the desperation with
which people with no other help turned to the government, the federal
government in particular, and pleaded, “Save us.” It’s indicated by how Kansas
and Oklahoma, two of the most reliably Republican states in the U.S., voted for
Franklin Roosevelt in both 1932 and 1936 (despite the fact that the Republican
nominee in 1936 was former Kansas Governor Alf Landon … but then Mitt Romney
didn’t carry Massachusetts either, come to think of it, though the term “home”
is so inapplicable to Romney’s lifestyle I remember joking grimly that he would
have won the election easily if he could just have carried all his home
states). The Dust Bowl was a disaster that was caused at least in part by the
abuses of private enterprise and was solved at least in part by the collective
wisdom brought to bear by a strong, activist national government — no wonder a
story about it today, especially from a source like PBS which they want to
defund completely, sticks in the craw of the Right! The film also proceeds from
the unusual assumption that the most interesting story of the Dust Bowl is in
the people who stayed behind and endured it (which were three-fourths of the
total) rather than the people who fled, who have become the master narrative
thanks largely to the success of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and the film John Ford made from it. (Ironically, the
narration of The Dust Bowl points out
that Steinbeck’s central characters, the Joads — a name I suspect Steinbeck
picked because it sounded like “Job” and reinforced the central metaphor of his
novel, which was as much or more religious than political — were dispossessed
cotton farmers from Eastern Oklahoma and therefore not from the Dust Bowl at
all.)

One of the quirkier stories told in the movie is that of Sanora Babb, a
writer who was hired by the Farm Security Administration of the U.S. government
to document the Dust Bowl and ended up writing a novel and getting a meeting
with Random House owner Bennett Cerf — only by the time her novel was ready for
publication, The Grapes of Wrath had
become such an enormous hit Cerf decided it had eaten up the market for a Dust
Bowl story and Babb’s book, Whose Names Are Unknown, wasn’t published until 2004, two years before Babb’s
death (and to make it even more ironic, Babb’s reports to the Farm Security
Administration had been key sources Steinbeck used for his book!).
Interestingly, Babb was also the long-time partner of Hollywood cinematographer
James Wong Howe, but couldn’t marry him until 1948, when the California Supreme
Court ruled the state’s law against interracial marriage unconstitutional. And
Woody Guthrie, who made a brief appearance at the end of part one, predictably
becomes a more important figure in part two — indeed, two segments of his
actual voice, heard in recorded interviews, are used in the film — and though
we only get a few snippets of his songs it’s bracing to be reminded of how much
faster and less sentimental his performances were than the way these songs are
performed today, now that they’ve become official Monuments of American
Culture. It’s also nice to be reminded that he didn’t start out as particularly
radical; it was the experience of living through, and then fleeing from, the
Dust Bowl that radicalized him and led him consciously to shape his career as a
folksinger of “the people” (there’s a haunting image of a crudely lettered
poster saying, “Hear WOODY Sing,” aimed at fellow Dust Bowl refugees, promoting
a free concert) and have the same sort of uncertain love-hate relationship with
the music and entertainment business we’ve seen in other socially conscious
performers since.

Overall, The Dust Bowl
is a compelling movie, relatively short (just four hours — a far cry from the
mega-productions with which Burns made his mark: The Civil War, Baseball,
Jazz) and compact, hinting at the
modern-day parallels without shoving them in our faces, the sort of film that
should be shown in contexts where you can discuss it at the end, a haunting
movie perched between individual stories of sacrifice and struggle and a
broader social tale with a moral lesson — though it’s possible conservative
audiences could read the history of the Dust Bowl differently from the way Ken
Burns does, not as a demonstration of the need for community and an aggressive
government response to disasters but as the farmers’ justly deserved punishment
for their hubris and something that
wasn’t really a problem for anyone not directly involved. It’s ironic that even
within Franklin Roosevelt’s Cabinet there were people like Interior Secretary
Harold Ickes who said, basically, let the plains farmers die and nature reclaim
their land — though Roosevelt sided with his Secretary of Agriculture, Henry
Wallace (who because of his dissent from the Cold War consensus a decade later
became, and has remained, one of the most reviled figures in American history),
who pleaded for a major government effort to restore the plains to farmland
with scientific methods and offer relief to its people. The parallel with the
argument between Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, and his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon, who said the way to
deal with the Depression was to let it run its course and not even try to stop it or offer relief to its victims, is inescapable.
— 11/20/12